Review of Lady of the Moon

Ada Dwyer Russell always intrigued me. She was a turn-of-the-century actress and lesbian with a Mormon background. If that isn't enough... she also turned down persistent proposals from her staggeringly wealthy lover Amy Lowell. And she was no spring chicken, either. Ada was forty-nine when she met Amy... an ominous age for a leading lady in an era before Social Security, food stamps, or subsidized housing.

My question: Why would an aging B- or C-list actress choose the backbreaking and impecunious life of a touring performer over a retirement of ease and privilege with the woman she loved?

And here allow me a little ironic digression. It is likely that Amy first saw Ada in the role she created of Mrs. Wiggs from the play Mrs. Wiggs of the Cabbage Patch. Believe it or not, the play was an adaptation of a book that was the second best-selling novel of 1902... an inane melodrama about how wonderful it is to be poor, with the widow Wiggs elevating optimism to the level of lunacy. ("My but it's nice an' cold this mornin'! The thermometer's done fell up to zero.") I wonder if the irony was lost on Amy Lowell...? (A digression from the digression, there is a hilarious Youtube clip from a filmed version of the play with Zazu Pitts and W.C. Fields... )

ANYWAY... history gives us no answers, just clues. We know Ada turned Amy down more than once. We know that Amy was persistent to the point of bullying, and that when Ada did eventually agree to move in with Amy on her Boston estate, Sevenels, she insisted that it be for a trial period of six months, and that she would work and be paid as Amy's assistant, receiving the same amount of money she would have earned had she continued to tour as an actor.

Ada had married at 30, birthed a daughter, and permanently separated from the husband a few years later-- although she never divorced. Having the status of a married woman would have been very helpful in a profession where single women were automatically presumed promiscuous, but we don’t really know why Ada never divorced. Perhaps, the husband was uncooperative. What we do know is that, at some point or points, Ada must have put up one hell of a fight to be on her own, to work for a living—especially in theatre, and to pursue her lesbianism openly enough to attract a lover like Amy Lowell.

And Amy Lowell was, frankly, a piece of work. I spent a lot of time studying her, as I adapted her writings for an evening of theatre. She emerges from letters and journals as a frustrated, spoiled-but-neglected, misunderstood child who developed into an intensely controlling and domineering woman.

What I conclude is that Ada, having escaped the tyranny of the Mormon church and conventional marriage/motherhood, could see the potential bondage of becoming financially dependent on Amy. She certainly experienced firsthand Amy’s abusive treatment of servants, often intervening. No doubt, she was concerned that it might only be a question of time before Amy would begin to see her--and treat her--as a social inferior.

Her fears appear to have been unjustified. Amy retained a respect bordering on worship for Ada for the rest of her life. She makes references to Ada in her poems as royalty, as a Greek goddess, and as a Madonna figure.

So all of this is a long lead-in to a review of the soon-to-be-published Lady of the Moon. It’s in intriguing volume that is divided into three parts: the poems of Amy Lowell (with a special focus on the ones that were written for and about Ada), an essay about Amy by lesbian superheroine/historian Lillian Faderman, and a series of poems by contemporary lesbian poet Mary Meriam, poems imagined in both Ada and Amy’s voices.

It was a delight to revisit Amy’s poems. And Lillian Faderman’s essay (originally published in Surpassing the Love of Men: Romantic Friendship and Love Between Women From the Renaissance to the Present) illuminates them with historical context as well as a refreshingly lesbian perspective on Amy’s many critics. Amy was attacked, of course, for being a woman, for using her privilege to advance her interests (something men are expected to do), for being “mannish,” and for being fat. The poet Witter Bynner coined the term “hippopoetess” in reference to her, and Ezra Pound made sure that the epithet made it around the world. In response to this harassment, Lowell gave the world her prose poem, “Spring Day, Part One: The Bath.” She invites readers (and critics) to to envision her naked in her bathtub:

“The sunshine pours in at the bathroom window and bores through the water in the bath-tub in lathes and planes of greenish-white. It cleaves the water into flaws like a jewel, and cracks it to bright light. Little spots of sunshine lie on the surface of the water and dance, dance, and their reflections wobble deliciously over the ceiling; a stir of my finger sets them whirring, reeling. I move a foot, and the planes of light in the water jar. I lie back and laugh, and let the green-white water, the sun-flawed beryl water, flow over me..."

And she puts her lesbianism right in their faces too… Here are some excerpts from her most explicit lesbian poem, “The Weather-Cock Points South.”

"I put your leaves aside,
One by one:
The stiff, broad outer leaves;
The smaller ones,
Pleasant to touch, veined with purple;
The glazed inner leaves.
One by one
I parted you from your leaves,
Until you stood up like a white flower
Swaying slightly in the evening wind…

…The bud is more than the calyx.
There is nothing to equal a white bud,
Of no colour, and of all,
Burnished by moonlight,
Thrust upon by a softly-swinging wind."

The final section of the book fills in many of the gaps in the story unfolded in Amy’s poems. Here Mary Meriam gives imagined voice to Ada and Amy in a series of expressive poems, mostly in the sonnet form. I have a special appreciation of the sonnets that reference Ada's life in the theatre:

“Daydreaming dim-lit corridors backstage,
I use the laughter, clinking, faint perfume
Of memory and fantasy to gauge
The time and distance to her dressing room…”

or…

“ … The play will end,
And then, what gesture will the world permit?
The players bow. The house begins to wend
Its way outside. I walk against the flow…”

Amy Lowell’s life and work have been treated with dismissal, with contempt, and with wild projection and distortion. Lady of the Moon returns her to us as a lesbian… and as a Muse. It is a testimony of the kind of blossoming that a woman can experience, especially a gender non-conforming lesbian, when she is fully seen and fully loved by another woman. I think of the great gentling influence that Ada had over this prickly and deeply damaged woman.

In the words of Faderman, Ada was “overseer of the estate, wifely president over Lowell’s table and cocktail parties, virtual bodyguard, governess to Lowell’s ill-mannered youth persona, literary assistant, and consultant. [Ada] critiqued Lowell’s poems, read page proofs, supervised her secretaries, soothed her ruffled feathers over bad reviews or literary disputes, soothed the ruffled feathers of others when Lowell had been too brusque with them, got rid of intrusive guests, and even coached Lowell in preparation of the dramatic monologues she read in public…”

And in Amy’s poetic tributes to Ada we see how it was actually Ada, all those years, folding back Amy’s stiff, protective leaves, revealing the inner sweetness of her lover, proving “the bud is more than the calyx.”

Footnote: Ada, by the way, outlived her younger lover by nearly thirty years, dying in 1952. Turns out she had good reason to be leery of wealthy people. Even though Amy had done all the legal work to leave her partner a lifetime interest in her estate, the surviving Lowells still found a way to evict her from Sevenels.

Another footnote: The book has a trailer!

And if you are interested in my dramatic adaptation of Lowell's work... Amy Lowell: In Her Own Words.